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Using Stem Cells to Save Endangered Species
RogerRoast writes "Starting with normal skin cells, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have produced the first stem cells from endangered species. Such cells could eventually make it possible to improve reproduction and genetic diversity for some species, possibly saving them from extinction, or to bolster the health of endangered animals in captivity. The study was published in the recent issue of Nature Methods."
wouldn't it be easier to stop the killing of the ones in the wild first?
The "conservatives" are going to go off...science, playing with life? Ain't nobody allowed to usurp the powers of their God.
'Cept them, of course, if it is something that they can deploy against scientists and other forms of liberals...e.g., taking an inanimate object like an article of incorporation, breathing "life" into it, and giving it so many rights that it becomes a supercitizen that can overwhelm the voices of millions of the *old-fashioned kind of citizens.
(*You know, the human kind?).
This is quite possibly the most moronic statement I've ever read.
I'm sick of us jumping in every time a species is about to die out. Too cute to fail? I say let them go extinct. The ones that survive who looked to the future instead of eating all the grass in the field this quarter are doing what's morally right, and will lead to a stronger society.
Before you know it, the lazy lower-class animals will be living in human-provided housing, with food handouts and arranged marriages, and the predation the superior specimens take part in will be outsourced to the hunters!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The "conservatives" are going to go off...science, playing with life? Ain't nobody allowed to usurp the powers of their God.
'Cept them, of course, if it is something that they can deploy against scientists and other forms of liberals...e.g., taking an inanimate object like an article of incorporation, breathing "life" into it, and giving it so many rights that it becomes a supercitizen that can overwhelm the voices of millions of the *old-fashioned kind of citizens.
(*You know, the human kind?).
Condescending remarks.... check. Stereotyping.... check. Paranoia.... check. Sarcasm and exaggeration as the basis for an arguement.... check.
Move on, nothing to see here.
This might sound cruel, and I'm sure I'll be modded down too, but animals have been going extinct since the beginning of time... Isn't it the circle of life? Aren't species supposed to die off eventually?
Should we be interfering with the laws of nature?
While I fully support what the scientists in the TFA are trying to do, I believe there is a danger that the sophomoric intellegentsia here (on /. that is) will see the headline and think "see, technology can solve the extinction problem, no need to worry" and go on to merrily support misguided and unsustainable policies.
Species extinction, ecosystem loss, and general loss of biodiversity are not a bad source code commits that you can simply roll back with enough technology.
Isn't it the circle of life? Aren't species supposed to die off eventually?
Should we be interfering with the laws of nature?
There is no "supposed to" involved (unless you believe it's a divine plan, in which case He, or She, or It, or They should let us know in unequivocal terms.) Species don't die off for the hell of it, they die off when their environment changes too much for them to survive and/or reproduce; and every species on Earth "interferes with the laws of nature" from every other species' perspective, simply by existing. Humans are, as far as we know, the only species capable of seeing the consequence of this interference and deciding to do something about it. If we choose not to do something about it -- guess what, we're interfering no less.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The answer is simple, but really worth saying, so I'll blow two moderations to make it (sorry, ChromeAeonium and Fluffeh.)
To quote Julian Huxley:
It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution — appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can't refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.
Not since the beginnings of life on this planet has one species had the ability to affect so many others, so quickly. Species have started going extinct at a far greater rate since humans started mucking things up than before. What we've been doing to this planet's biodiversity is a lot more than it did to itself before we showed up.
Of course, stories like this one pop up from time to time, but if the truth is that we really don't know, then it's probably wiser to be careful and protective than presumptuous and selfish.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
But the next thing you know, you've got a theme park full of velociraptors hunting down the park's patrons.
#DeleteChrome
Here's a radical idea I heard about: let's domesticate everything remotely domesticable. After all, cats and dogs aren't going to go extinct any time soon. I'm pretty sure that quite a few species like red pandas could make very viable pets. In fact they're probably endangered by their protection status. Who wouldn't want to have something this cute? Allow people to keep them, and they'll get bred like rabbits. Videos like this one suggest that they'd make pretty fun pets.
For breeds that are too large, breed them down to a manageable size (if we can make a chihuahua surely we can make a dog sized tiger).
Experiments with foxes seem to show that domestication is quite possible in a reasonable amount of time, and research shows that only 40 genes seem to be responsible for the domestication.
So, here's the idea: domesticate everything, study what changed in the genetics, and if the wild population decays too much, use the genetics research to reverse the domestication, while drawing from the abundant pet population.
I think that this might be the better solution long term, as maintaining habitats and populations is a never ending struggle, while that is never a problem for any species people have an use for.
Interferring with the laws of nature is what we do.
Yes, unfit species die out naturally but we're massively screwing with things to the point that very few species can manage to cope, and that's not a good thing. We need things to remain in balance, otherwise bad things like huge amounts of pests happen.
Besides, animals are a source of a huge amount of research. Who knows if the cure for cancer is going to come from the research of some animal that's about to become extinct?
For instance, the Axolotl is endangered, which is really bad for a species that has such remarkable qualities like regeneration.
why not just store their genetic information in a big 'noah's ark' database let the extinction just happen, see if a creature was really needed for the ecosystem and if yes, revive it
What a lovely post... too bad you're just plain wrong.
>Not since the beginnings of life on this planet has one species had the ability to affect so many others
This is an utterly unproven assertion, I nearly left it at [Citation needed] but the reality is that if a comet wiped us off the face of the earth tomorrow, chances are in 20 million years there would be NO surviving evidence of our ever having been here. There could have been many other intelligent species who reached our levels and we would not have any way of knowing. It's possible we're unique, but it's by no means certain.
>Species have started going extinct at a far greater rate since humans started mucking things up than before
Not even remotely true - the history of life on this planet is filled with mass extinctions that make our entire existence look like a blimp on a chart. The Cambrian extinction wiped out 96% of the species alive at that time - we still don't know what caused it (we have some theories but nothing confirmed). The K/T event wiped out just about every species on the planet bigger than a rat. Lucky for us... our ancestors then were about the size of shrews, the few surviving large animals were all aquatic (nile crocodile and the great white shark for example). The history of this planet is one of repeated mass-extinctions, over and over just when life reaches an apparent high-point the universe throws a rock at us or the planet freezes over and 95% or more of the life forms around get wiped out in an instant.
The average life expectancy of a species is 10-million years (we're already there in other words) and 97% of the life forms that have ever existed are extinct. 94% of them were extinct before mammals arrived - let alone humans.
The good news is, each time there's a mass extinction it's followed by the greatest booms of biodiversity that we find in history. Right after an extinction there are no predators, no specialists so all sorts of bodyplans and weird evolutionary ideas can survive - soon they start to get weeded out as specialists do better and biodiversity eventually stabilizes around systems that have only a few species in each niche. We're in the middle of such a stable intermediary period.
There is a much more pragmatic reason to do conservation - exactly because extinction is such a guarantee. Mass extinctions would take us with it - and not all mass extinctions happen because a rock fell from the sky. Some are caused by life forms. One of the largest mass extinctions was caused by the evolution of photosynthesis in plants. Suddenly the air was pumped full of a terribly toxic, highly corrosive gas - ultimately making up 21% of the atmosphere - practically every other lifeform on the planet died out. But new lifeforms evolved - which turned this poison into a crucial part of their very biochemistry - for us (as their descendents) oxygen is not a horribly corrosive poison - it's the gas we cannot live without !
The reason to try and keep the natural order we evolved in as stable as possible with as few disruptions as possible, to preserve as many species as we can is simple: life will go on, the planet will survive with or without us... but every disruption we make - every species WE drive extinct, every forrest we chop down is risking OUR OWN survival. We can do only limited actions to protect ourselves from rocks falling out of the sky, but we can try to keep from melting the polar ice-caps ourselves. We can try to keep species alive, to preserve a balance we are evolved to fit into - or we risk taking ourselves out with them.
As Michael Chrighton says in Ian Malcolm's speech near the end of Jurassic Park (the book, not the movie), we don't have to worry about saving the planet- but if we're lucky (and smart), we may be able to save ourselves.
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This is the best idea to save any animal from going extinct - eat them! If they are eaten, one has to farm them, if one has to farm them, their supply will be continuous. But make a list of the animals we want, and the ones we don't, and pick accordingly. I don't want to eat snakes; lions, otoh, I wouldn't mind. OTOH, most insects, like mosquitoes, flies, wasps, et al don't face extinction @ all, and it's not like the food-chain would be inadequate w/o them.
This is just a gimmick to make the public feel better about the loss of wildlife and wild places. The human population is set to double over the next thirty years (it has already doubled in my lifetime) and no politician seems willing to broach the subject.
Of course species will become extinct. It is entirely predictable. We are trashing the forest and bush where they would have lived.
Are we supposed to save all of the species or just the cute furry ones that provoke empathy?
Every time I've seen someone mention pandas or saving furry ones on /. for the years I've been reading has run to this argument. It's flawed not because they are furry but because *gasp* even furry and cute animals have the possibility of providing novel solutions.
Case and point was with the panda itself in a recent /. article from a few days back. The headline is misleading but if you read TFA you understand that we learned about some cool bacteria while we were busy finding them cute and cuddly.
AC
In your first two paragraphs you argue that man has not had a massive effect on this planet's ecosystem compared to any other species, because natural events have caused mass extinction in the past.
No the original argument was correct. Compared to any other species that has ever existed, the influence of humans has been massive. Compared to natural events that no species had any control over, yeah not so much.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
According to one notable ethologist, 99% of all the phenotypes ever produced by DNA sequences are extinct, with the current surviving phenotypes exquisitely adapted via natural selection to the current environment. Are we seeing a paradigm shift in natural selection? DNA is certainly capable of directed selection, as famously pointed out by another notable ethologist;DNA now seems to be able to alter natural selection ex post facto. If true, it is a fucking stunning achievement for DNA.
endangered species are mostly endangered by habitat destruction. you cannot have forest panther without the forest. you cant have a desert elephant without the desert. you cant have a polar bear without the polar. saving a single animal's DNA is just moronic.
>In your first two paragraphs you argue that man has not had a massive effect on this planet's ecosystem compared to any other species, because natural events have caused mass extinction in the past.
I argued about man's effect on other species over the sum of the lifetime of the planet. I didn't argue that we have no impact, I pointed out how another lifeform caused one of the biggest extinction events in history by changing the structure of the atmosphere - any doubt that a lifeform can do so is settled right there (as one example).
As I indicated some (not all) mass extinctions are caused by terestrial events, some by life-forms. We are at a very real risk of being one of those life-forms that cause a mass extinction event, and unlike the plants we have very little chance of surviving it ourselves if we do.
A global nuclear war would be a mass extinction event, it would also take humanity out right along with it. See my point ?
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I'm still waiting for my pet velociraptor. How am I to defend myself against the zombie hordes without velociraptors?!
Stopping extinctions isn't about being nice, it's about keeping the world livable. Nature doesn't die out it just adapts to the environment. If regular animals can't survive they will mutate/evolve into monsters that can, or develop intelligence so they can build weapons and take back the wilderness by force.
Obligitory George Carlin bit
Homo sapiens has had more impact on biodiversity than any other species. The Great Oxidation Event lasted hundreds of millions of years and, while we have no means of establishing a survey of taxa from that era, it was most likely the result of a very large number of species, and indeed is such a long period of time that many speciation events could readily have occurred. Further, the autotrophs that released the oxygen in the first place had no means of affecting many of the anaerobes that live deep underground—and we do.
Here are your citations for humanity's impact. Suffice it to say that many of them will still be noticeable in a few million years:
I don't know why you then decided to compare humanity's effect on biodiversity to that of mass extinction events, but let me explain to you why they are completely different.
When an extinction event occurs, there is a single source of pressure that living organisms must accommodate, or at most a couple: the sky is darker, the air is colder, the atmosphere is now filled with water rather than ammonia, et cetera. Humans have not been exerting this kind of pressure at all. We systematically destroy ecosystems, replacing hundreds of species of plants and animals with just one or two (which are, naturally, attuned to depend on us feeding, fertilizing, irrigating, and sheltering them) and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us.)
This is too much for evolution to handle. Especially due to chemical poisoning, many of the hardiest species most likely to survive a natural disaster have been snared by exotic and unexpected genetic vulnerabilities. DDT was found to act as a sex hormone in birds, for example, causing males to develop female genitalia. As a South African, I'm sure you're aware that it's still in use, combating Malaria, even though it has been banned in many countries.
We are whittling down biodiversity in ways that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe didn't. It selected one major branch of the tree, the organisms that depended on a reducing atmosphere, and marginalized them, creating room for the healthy and d
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Okay, I am not going to argue with somebody trained in the field. My point was much simpler and actually greatly overlaps with yours - particularly this bit:
"and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us"
- Exactly. The impacts we're having will ultimately cause our own (possible) extinction.
Now it's quite true that our many varied impacts are more complex than (most) extinction events - but you COULD see it as one event "evolution of modern man" , I won't argue about whether that's a valid way to look at it- you're better trained for such analysis than me and I defer to your knowledge.
What stands is that we are harming the living organisms on the planet severely - and that harms us. You gave lots of interesting links and data but nothing disproved my core point.
At the same time many top scientists in your own field, including Jack Cohen, agrees with my view (in fact my post directly quoted some of his works a few times - though it was single lines and an idea which is why I didn't credit him in particular, especially since I grossly oversimplified it).
The Boston Foreskin Collector is an expert in this particular field of biology and he strongly believes our combined impacts are smaller than any extinction event by many orders of magnitude.
Ironically - what you're saying is while very true, not very relevent. Worst case scenario - humanity does something so stupid we wipe out every vertebrate on the planet. We take out 95% of the bacteria and all the insects while we're at it, oh and let's take out all the fish as well (which we're pretty close to doing anyway).
Life isn't gone. Virusses still exist (though I am aware that many biologists don't consider them a lifeform there is definite dissent in the field about that - personally I side with those that consider them one and prefer more inclusive definitions of "alive" than 'DNA molecule' - a more successful one than we are actually) , we won't get ALL the bacteria - the extremophiles will survive, a few others too. In fact all the corpses we leave lying around will probably be very fertile breeding ground for the few that survive and they will absolutely prosper.
The simple reality is, if even one single organism survive - even if it's a single celled organism... life will go on, in ten million years teh planet will be crawling with new multicellular creatures. They may take a completely different route, they may never evolve dipoblasts and tripoblasts - or a very similar one.
But humanity cannot wipe out life. Hell even if we COULD somehow wipe out every single lifeform on the planet... I wager life would start again. Now this is a less proven point - I side with the scientists who believe life to be extremely resilient and able to spring up anywhere and everywhere that it's remotely possible - and nothing we do short of actually blowing the planet to smithereens will make it completely impossible for anything to EVER live on again.
Life will go on - but we won't be here, we won't be part of it. We may take out everything in nature that think is "normal" but we won't be the end of life. All our most powerful technology, even all our nuclear bombs at once won't do as much harm as a single comet - and life survived them.
All we do, in all our areas are horrible - and we risk being an extinction event as a species, taking ourselves and every other lifeform we know out. But I am quite convinced new life will come - will find a way.
This is NOT consolation, it's not an argument against conservation - on the contrary, if we value the existence of our species then we must increase our effort to conserve. We must live in greater harmony with other species. We must reduce pollution and eradicate things like DDT (btw. kudo's for noting where I live, and being aware of the issue - I am firmly opposed to DDT for malaria fighting, not least because it's utterly ineffective, all you get is resistent mosquitos that
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I've re-read your post, and want to add two things. I quoted Chrichton (who - btw was is actually a real scientist - notably a biologist (more notably a medical doctor) and was one for a long time before he started writing) as a more jocular and less serious way to make my point. I never suggested that particular line should be taken as factual.
Secondly -you and I are saying the exact same thing - and arguing about the semantic detail. You are much more accurate and complex in your wording but your conclusion and mine are identical.
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I think it comes down to this: your position is that "we're harming the life and destroying something precious, and that's bad for us," and my position is that "yes, we're harming ourselves in the process, but the effects on the planet are more important." Like many biologists, I'll sleep better at night once we can pull ourselves off the planet and leave it to its business, and the thought of the human species going away is not quite as heartbreaking.
Biology and medical research use the same tools these days, but Crichton went to medical school in the sixties, when our knowledge of both genetics and our impact on the environment was extremely limited. I don't disagree with the sentiment of the quote itself, but it's a little like quoting Bill Gates on child-rearing.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Any quote is an appeal to authority. By itself that's a fallacy. It can only strengthen an already strong argument. It cannot make a bad one better. Despite Crichton 's legendary research efforts. ( the Jurassic park premise was only proven flawed several years later) I wouldn't call him an authority on conservation anyway. I just liked the way he worded an idea I agree with.
Wanting, indeed striving to survive is the prerogative of every life form. That does include us and I believe space exploration is our one chance to really Jp our odds (Cohen would agree). Success is
Not guaranteed bit we ought to try.
That said I don't agree with your less than other creatures idea. I also don't think we're more. In fact I take exception to us being called homo sapience
Wisdom is our rarest attribute so that's out and there is no genus homo. We (and other extinct homo variants) differ only marginally more from pan troglodytes or pan pinuscus than they do differ from one another. We are the third living chimpanzee. And clearly got our sex drives from the same ancestors as bonobos did!
I'd call us pan curiosita if I'm feeling generous. The chimp that asks questions. But pan destructus would sadly fit even better
not guaranteed but trying is worth it
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